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Can you stop an alien ship before a missile blows it and you to pieces?

An object game from deep space. It just suddenly appeared out of hyperspace and moved towards the solar system at something close to the speed of light. Attempts to make contact failed, it had to be destroyed.

A missile is to be launched from Earth in 45 minutes and would destroy the object (codenamed Omega) in another 15. In that time, your mission is to explore Omega and shut down its four reactors so that it would cease to be a threat and Earth will benefit from its artefacts.

Fail and they will be lost in the explosion and so might you.

You command the Windwraith, a mining ship from the United States of Europe and you have just received a priority one order to accept the mission. Your sixty minutes has already begun.

Onboard your ship you have 500kg of raw materials with which you can construct and arm robots that you will send to explore the ship. For each robot you can determine its base, power pack, weapon and sensor, check that it works (not too heavy for its base chassis) and then send it into Omega.

The options available to you allow your robots to range from light scouting hover robots armed with small lasers and audio sensors to missile-carrying nuclear-powered, tracked destroyers that follow the scouts and sort out any trouble in the way. In between there are a whole range of creations that can be constructed from hover, sphere, legs and tracs bases, battery or nuclear power packs, audio, infra red or visual sensors and laser, particle beam or missile weapon systems.

Robots can be built at any time durng your mission as long as you have the materials so it's a good idea to quickly build some scouts equipped with various sensors and send them in for a look around.

Inside Omega you can control any of your robots in two different ways, either manually through the keyboard or a joystick or in automatic mode where it will follow a set path that you have programmed into it. This is particularly useful to either retrace your steps or follow the path another robot took.

You can also instantly plot the position of all your robots (up to eight at any one time) via the map function that shows rooms already explored. Point the cursor at any room and you can have a closer look at its contents.

Inside Omega, your robots will find a maze of rooms and corridors filled with alien artifacts which are (to you) purely decorative. However, you will also find transporters (to instantly move you from one of Omega's quadrant to another), impassable laser beams blocking your path, alien robots that must be destroyed and eventually the four reactors.

The robots and the laser barriers are your first problem that must be tackled. The robots, although the more deadly, is the easier to solve. Blat them before they blast you. The barriers are more of a problem since they block the path you usually need to take. The barriers themselves are controlled by wall switches that are found in many rooms.

Unfortunately, to add to your problems, toggling a switch may turn off the barrier that is presently blocking your path but it also might turn on a few others elsewhere. Consequently you will have to use your scouts to ensure that the right switches are used at the right time to let the heavier, slower, robots through without delay.

Once you've mastered this, you almost have control of Omega and you should soon be able to destroy the enemy robots that will allow the scouts to search for the reactors. Only one question remains: can you complete all that in just one hour?

To help you the game is controlled by icons that allow you to build your robots and then control them in Omega. The screen displays are almost self-explanatory and allow you to concentrate on your tactics. Get them right and you could be a hero. Get them wrong and you will be dead.

Mission Omega is available in Spectrum, Amstrad and C64 versions from Mind Games and costs £9.95.